When Archie notes that "where I come from...a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her," Samad dismisses the advice by noting that "where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean that it is a good idea."
These tensions are the questions and the answers of the novel. Smith frequently restates the themes of the novel within the book. In my extensive notes for this review, there were no fewer than five quotations singled out with the note "theme."
These include "our children are born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies" and "if religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely, rarely appears sinister" or Alsana's declaration upon reading in an encyclopedia that being Bengali means being Indo-Aryan: "It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy tale!"
Smith wants us to question the fairytales of immigration. Though the book is very much about the English experience of moving from colonizer to migration destination, it makes one think about the new world models, too, the mosaics and the melting pots.
The book demands that the reader look both inward and outward. It is about hope and impossibility, redemption and damnation, about race, culture, learning to live together, and the important stands we must make that keep us part.
Simply put, Smith has created a novel that is about what it means to live in England, now, when you are not an affluent intellectual but just an average guy from working class London or eastern India, or one of their lost children, just trying to find your place when nowhere feels like home.
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